Congrats on jumping from sales at a large multi-national to a startup. I've move into progressively smaller companies (Now running a very small startup) and the smaller they are the more full of life they have seemed to be. This is the way it should be.
Although I cringed at reading a couple of the lines here, specifically the book on sales and clearly defining roles. I have tried something similar in my past and I consider it to be one of my mistakes. I like creating structure around chaos but I've found these methodologies to be the bane of a startup or small company's culture and ability to move forward. They're like poison. Do they work in larger corporations? I think so. Maybe. I've used some of them successfully (Also consider this to be among my many mistakes). But everyone you deal with is much more apathetic, they're willing to tolerate more and/or will just ignore it. In a startup everything is much more sensitive and I find that excessive structure and process kills, well, everything.
I have spent a fair bit of time in sales at different levels (Retail to long cycle million dollar B2B) and I cringe at these books and training seminars. Going on the road and selling with someone good in real-time is far more valuable than any book or seminar. The good reps that I've seen already do the things they teach at some level naturally and few of them have read books or gone to a ton of seminars (I have witnessed one or two cases where a well performing rep followed these things religiously but seemed successful in spite of them not because of them).
Now that I've effectively ragged on your approach (Which I really can't tell exactly what it is from this simple blog post, I'm hinging it all on two things I read - I apologize if it's not an accurate representation of your approach), you may be right and I may be wrong. There doesn't seem to be one right way...
I don't think Lamar would disagree that going into the field is more valuable than any book or seminar. In fact, that's pretty much where all of the sales strategies we use are battle-tested and refined. As a startup, in many cases we've opted to hire someone without the immediate skillset (out of college) but who has potential to succeed. We need a common vocabulary, a common set of expectations, and a knowledge base to work from.
Books like this one are the net, not the trapeze act.
Although I cringed at reading a couple of the lines here, specifically the book on sales and clearly defining roles. I have tried something similar in my past and I consider it to be one of my mistakes. I like creating structure around chaos but I've found these methodologies to be the bane of a startup or small company's culture and ability to move forward. They're like poison. Do they work in larger corporations? I think so. Maybe. I've used some of them successfully (Also consider this to be among my many mistakes). But everyone you deal with is much more apathetic, they're willing to tolerate more and/or will just ignore it. In a startup everything is much more sensitive and I find that excessive structure and process kills, well, everything.
I have spent a fair bit of time in sales at different levels (Retail to long cycle million dollar B2B) and I cringe at these books and training seminars. Going on the road and selling with someone good in real-time is far more valuable than any book or seminar. The good reps that I've seen already do the things they teach at some level naturally and few of them have read books or gone to a ton of seminars (I have witnessed one or two cases where a well performing rep followed these things religiously but seemed successful in spite of them not because of them).
Now that I've effectively ragged on your approach (Which I really can't tell exactly what it is from this simple blog post, I'm hinging it all on two things I read - I apologize if it's not an accurate representation of your approach), you may be right and I may be wrong. There doesn't seem to be one right way...